The Bush Administration Helps Terrorists Accomplish Their Main Goal: Terrorizing Us and Curtailing Our Freedoms

BuzzFlash has written many an editorial and news analysis that comes to the same conclusion: Bush gives the terrorists what they want by playing to their hand. In return, Rove gets to use terrorism as a tactic of fear to keep American voters in the Republican camp.

In short, in the true fashion of demagogues, fear becomes the cudgel to amass power. The terrorists need Bush to help create a market for more terrorists; and Rove needs terrorists to keep the radical GOP at the center of a one party country for years to come.

It’s a betrayal of America. It’s political cynicism at its most brazen and traitorous.

We’ve talked about the many reasons that BuzzFlash has made – and continues to make – such a bold assertion. (Although if you doubt its validity as being “too over the top,” let us ask you this: tell us how the Bush Administration would still be in power if 9/11 had not occcurred?)

An August 24 Wired News commentary entitled “Refuse to be Terrorized” offers more corroboration for BuzzFlash’s charge. In a compelling, succinct column, the case is made that by constantly bombarding us with sensationalistic announcements of “terror threats,” the Bush Administration and the media are accomplishing one of the key goals of the terrorists – which is to terrorize us.

The fact is that by keeping us in a constant state of fear, the Bush Administration creates a state of terror even if no terrorist act occurs (and, if one does, all the better to roll out the Hollywood image of Bush as “the Great 9/11 Leader.”)

Some excerpts from the Wired News analysis will say it better than BuzzFlash can:

“The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.

The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.”

“Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we're terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists' actions, and increase the effects of their terror.”

“The implausible plots and false alarms actually hurt us in two ways. Not only do they increase the level of fear, but they also waste time and resources that could be better spent fighting the real threats and increasing actual security. I'll bet the terrorists are laughing at us.”

And the author of the column, Bruce Schneier, exhorts:

“But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show's viewership.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer.”

Well said, indeed.

The reality is that when you have an administration and political party who are so radical and incompetent that they can only rule and amass dictatorial powers by suffocating us in fear and terror, then it is hard to turn the intentional state of mass hysteria around.

Yes, there are terrorists. Yes, there is cancer. Yes, there is poverty.

Yes, there are 40,000 automobile deaths a year.

But we don’t see sensational political and media campaigns about the number of people killed in car accidents, do we?

And the American love affair with the car hasn’t resulted in a fear of driving because of all the people killed while in an automobile, has it.

More importantly, our love affair with the American Constitution shouldn’t result in a divorce from that document because of a cheap and sleazy manipulation of our emotions by the White House that only helps terrorists achieve their primary goal: a state of terror.